The shop was full of women making purchases. Most of them were tourists, English, Italian or |German and Melina had the feeling that there was nothing sinister about any of them. But they sampled goods, changed their minds and asked for fruit and vegetables that required weighing, so it was a long time before she could get anyone to serve her.
When at last she was asked what she required, she bought a loaf of crisp French bread, some butter, ham, sausage and cheese and half a dozen tangerines with the leaves still attached to them.
She persuaded the shopkeeper to put them all in a large, brown paper bag and slung it over her arm, hoping that it would look like some casual purchases of no special significance.
Then, striving to appear in no particular hurry, stopping to glance in two or three shop windows on the way, she walked back to the hotel. She felt as if eyes were boring into her back as she walked across the foyer and was taken up in the lift.
The Arab was still dozing in the corner of the corridor and she noted that he was out of sight of the lift and that, as usual, there were no servants about to serve these unimportant rooms on the top floor of the hotel.
She paused for a moment outside her own door, wondering if what she had half anticipated would happen had done so and Bing had already gone. Perhaps she had dreamt him and the whole incredible episode.
Then she knocked and heard his voice say,
“Who’s there?”
“It’s me – Melina,” she replied nervously.
She heard the key turn.
She opened the door and saw to her surprise that he was dressed. He was wearing an old grey flannel suit, a clean white shirt with a dark blue tie and had a pair of comfortable leather slippers on his feet.
She looked round for a suitcase and saw none.
“Your servant was very quick,” she exclaimed.
“Very,” he agreed.
“Your clothes must have been quite near here.”
“Now you are being curious,” he said, “and I am dying of hunger.”
“I’m sorry,” she replied. “I only hope I have brought you something you will like.”
She took out the contents of her bag and put them on the small table.
“A feast for the Gods!” he exclaimed.
“I didn’t know whether to bring you anything to drink,” she answered.
“The tangerines will be quite enough,” he said. “And now will you forgive me if I stop talking and stuff myself? I really am very hungry.”
She felt almost maternal as she watched him buttering the bread and stuffing it into his mouth, eating the ham with his fingers and following it with cheese, which he sandwiched between two pieces of buttered crust.
Finally he gave a little sign as if in repletion.
“I would not have exchanged that meal for all the caviar in Russia,” he sighed.
“What do we do now?” Melina asked.
“Wait for a little longer. I am expecting a visitor.”
“A visitor?”
“Yes,” he answered. “But don’t be nervous. It’s no one of any importance, merely someone who is bringing us a car.”
“Then we really are leaving today?” Melina queried. “I had better start packing.”
“I can give you about half an hour,” he said. “In the meantime, will you object if I take a short sleep on your bed?”
“No, of course not,” Melina replied.
“Like my meals, my sleeping hours have been slightly erratic these last few days.
He lay down as he spoke, pulling the pillow behind his head and then almost as if he had switched out a light he was asleep.
Melina stared at him in amazement.
She had never imagined that anyone could drop off so quickly and yet she had the feeling that should it be required of him he could as quickly awake and be instantly alert.
She took her suitcases from the cupboard and filled them quickly. She did not not many clothes with her, she had not been able to afford them, but what she had had been chosen with care.
Her clothes, she had thought, would be worthy of the land she longed to visit. Crisp, fresh, cotton dresses, two pretty, uncrushable evening dresses, a white coat to wear over them and shoes that she was wise enough to buy because they were comfortable rather than because they looked fashionable.
She was ready and everything was in her suitcase and still Bing slept on.
Then there was a sudden knock at the door and, exactly as she had known would happen, he was wide awake and sitting up almost before whoever had knocked could have taken their hand away.
“Ask who it is,” he said almost under his breath.
“Who’s there?” Melina enquired.
“A message for Mr. Lindsay!” a boy’s voice replied.
Bing gave Melina a little imperceptive signal with his head to open the door.
She saw him move back further into the room and his hand go to the pocket of his coat. She opened the door a little.
Only a pageboy stood there.
“The car is waiting below, madame,” the boy said. “And here is a letter for Mr. Lindsay.”
She took it from him, found a small coin in her bag and gave it to him. He thanked her politely and walked away down the corridor. Before she could even shut the door Bing had taken the envelope from her and torn it open.
Without really realising that she was doing so, she looked over his shoulder. Only two words were written on the piece of paper that he opened, ‘Villa Harris’.
The words seemed somehow to please him.
He thrust the paper and the envelope into his pocket and picked up her suitcases.
“Come along,” he urged.
“But your luggage!” Melina cried.
“I have everything I want,” he answered with a smile and she knew that somehow the information had merely been of interest to whoever was listening when she told the man at the reception desk that her husband had arrived and that his luggage would be coming later.
Parked immediately outside the hotel was a small grey Peugeot. Bing put Melina’s luggage on the back seat and helped her into the front.
Then he climbed in behind the wheel.
It seemed to Melina that no one even glanced at them as they drove off and yet she felt from her own point of view that she was doing something so eccentric, so outrageous and extraordinary that everyone must stand and look.
Without saying goodbye, without even notifying the hotel that she was leaving, Melina Lindsay was driving away with a strange man she had never met until a few hours ago, a man of whom she knew nothing, a man who seemed to be taking part in an extremely dangerous and frightening mission also of which she knew nothing. A man, moreover, who had just engaged her to play the part of his wife!
They moved off into the busy traffic of the main street and then, as Bing put the grey car into top gear, he leaned back in his seat and turned to glance at her small serious face.
“Enjoying yourself, Mrs. Ward?” he asked.
Chapter 3
They left the crowded streets behind and started to climb a small hill behind the town on which Melina could see that there was a white villa surrounded by a high wall.
Bing pointed to it with his finger.
“Villa Harris!” he said. “Built by an Englishman who was a correspondent of The Times. He is dead now and the Moroccans have made it one of the landmarks of the town and tourists are taken out to look at it, from the outside of course.”
“No one is allowed in?” Melina asked, disappointed.
Bing shook his head.
“You’re lucky if you can get inside any of the buildings in Tangier once they are owned by the natives,” he said. “They rather object to being stared at, and who doesn’t?”
“I should like to go inside a real Moroccan house,” Melina said.
Bing did not answer. He was intent on passing a number of small boys who were playing ball at the corner of the street in imminent danger of their lives.
“You must have been in a great many,” Melina remarked.
“What makes you think that?” Bing asked.
“When you are dressed as an Arab, surely you can go into Arab houses?” Melina ventured.
She knew that she was being curious and was not unprepared for the little sidelong glance that Bing gave her and the twist of his lips as he said,
“Les jeuxs sont faits, madame,”
It was the cry of the croupier at every casino when no one may stake any more money because the ball is rolling in the roulette wheel.
Melina knew with a sense of exasperation that Bing had seen through her idea of making him talk and she sat back silent in the seat until Bing stopped the car below the villa.
“We walk from here,” he said. “It’s too rough for my tyres.”
She had a feeling, although she could not put it into words, that there were other reasons for his wishing to walk.
Obediently she climbed out into the hot sun, shaking the skirt of her cotton dress to prevent it from being creased and being glad, when she saw the rough stones and sand on what was little more than a cart track, that she was wearing low-heeled sandals.
As they rounded the high white walls, the view over the sea was breathtaking. There were few people about, for it was the time of siesta and Melina knew that most of the Moslems would be asleep in their houses or drowsing over their wares in the marketplace until the heat of the afternoon abated a little.
“Mad dogs and Englishmen – ” she mused aloud and Bing turned to smile at her.
“It isn’t hot yet,” he said. “Besides, I like the sun, don’t you?”
“I can’t really answer that question. I have never been in a hot country until now.”
“Morocco is not really hot,” Bing replied. “You should try India, the Persian Gulf or Aden in June. And even Algiers, next door, can be uncomfortably warm in the summer months.”
He was talking casually enough, but Melina knew that his eyes were moving ahead of them, searching the stumpy trees and rocks and even a camping ground that was a little farther on, as if he was expecting to see something unusual.
The stony ground slipped beneath their feet and still they climbed. There were two children in charge of the three small thin goats grazing a little above them,
Below them the ground fell away until they reached one point in the hillside where there was a sheer drop down hundreds of feet of rough shale cliff.
There were a few trees growing along the side and a broken-down fence that had once prevented cars and perhaps people from running over the edge in the dark.
The leaves of the trees were thick and dark in colour and silhouetted against the sky they made a picture that Melina somehow felt would be engraved on her mind.
Everywhere she looked she saw a lovelier scene than the last. It was hard to believe that only an hour or so earlier Bing had been pursued by men intent on violence or worse.
“You were expecting someone to meet you here?” Melina asked in a low voice.
“Perhaps,” Bing replied enigmatically.
“There doesn’t seem anyone about,” Melina said. “I can see some tents at the end of the camping ground. They look to me rather like those used by boy scouts.”
Bing turned in the direction she pointed and with his back to the cliff searched with narrowed eyes the long grassy incline where the boys were playing with the goats.
There was a monument of some sort in the distance, a memorial perhaps, nothing more sinister.
“What do we do now?” Melina asked.
She turned her face up to his as she spoke and, even as she did so, she saw a slight movement in the tree behind him.
If she had not been expecting trouble and in consequence been tense and on edge, she would not have screamed so quickly.
As it was, her scream made Bing swing round just in time to catch the man who had sprung at his back. He was an Arab and he held a knife in his hand!
After the first scream had left her lips, Melina felt paralysed and unable to move. She could only stand breathless and watch Bing struggling with the man who, although smaller in height, was fighting fanatically.
As he jumped, Bing had caught hold of the man’s right wrist and, although he kicked and clawed and struggled, he was unable to use the long pointed knife that gleamed in the sunshine or to strike as he had intended.
They struggled in silence, the only sound being the scuffle of their feet on the gravel.
Then almost before Melina could realise what was happening Bing picked up the man bodily in both his arms.
For a second he held him high above his head before he flung him over the battered fence and down the deep stony ravine.
There was one cry, the sound of a thud and a shower of stones as the body fell over and over, bashing itself against the rocks as it fell.
And then silence.
There was sweat on Bing’s face as he turned towards Melina, but there was something else that made her take a step backwards from him – a new feeling she had never known before seeping through her as if she, herself, had received a knife in her heart.
His face was transformed.
No longer was it the face of a quiet pleasant Englishman, but the face, she told herself, of a devil. There was a glint in his eyes, a cruel twist to his mouth, the set of his jaw and, above all, an expression of satisfaction, of triumph.
It was then, instinctively, that she began to run, running away from him, her feet scurrying over the stony, sandy path as her terror urged her on until, passing the Villa Harris, she found herself back again at the car.
The run had exhausted her and without thinking coherently that it was Bing’s car yet also Bing from whom she was escaping, she leant against it panting, holding on with her hands to one of the side mirrors although after being in the sun the chromium seemed to burn her as if it was on fire.
She heard him come up behind her and, without looking up, she managed to gasp,
“Let – me – go! I cannot – stay with – you. Let me – go!”
“Pull yourself together!”
He spoke sharply and opened the door of the car.
“Get in,” he ordered.
“I can’t. I’ll – I’ll – walk back,” Melina managed to mumble.
“Get in!”
His voice was inexorable and she obeyed him simply because she no longer had any breath to argue with.
She sank down in the seat and put her hands up to her eyes.
She could not look at him, she could not bear to see that expression on his face.
Why had she been such a fool to come here with this man, this killer who enjoyed the killing? In a kind of agony she heard him open the door next to the driver’s seat.
Then, as she expected him to climb into the car, she heard him pause.
There was a child’s voice speaking to him in Arabic, begging, no doubt, for money in the traditional way or presenting a nosegay of wild flowers that he had picked on the hillside.
Bing was feeling in his pocket and then, in an ordinary conversational voice that any husband might have used to his wife, he asked,
“Do you have any small change?”
With trembling hands, fighting back the tears that were now pricking her eyes, Melina opened her bag. She pulled out her small purse and handed it to him and saw that he took a coin out of it and gave it to the boy before he got into the car and tossed a little nosegay of flowers onto her lap.
“Thank you,” he said, giving the purse into her nervous hand.
With an effort she forced herself to put her purse away and then realised that he had not started up the car but was just sitting in it.
She turned her face away from him looking blindly out of the window beside her.
“Melina, look at me!”
“I don’t – want to.”
She knew it was the reply of a sulky child, but somehow she felt peculiarly childlike at this moment.
“Melina, don’t
be silly. These things have to be done. You have to understand. Besides, I owe you a debt of gratitude.”
Still she did not answer and he went on,
“It was him or me! If you hadn’t screamed, that knife would have been buried in my back. And you would have had a lot of explaining to do as to why your ‘husband’ should have been killed by some religious fanatic beside the Villa Harris on a quiet afternoon when everything else seemed at peace.”
“How – could you – do it?” Melina asked. “Wasn’t there – any other way?”
“Melina, look at me,” he repeated and, when she did not obey him, he put out his hand and taking her small chin in his fingers turned her face round to his.
For a moment she resisted him and then, compelled almost against her will, her eyes opened and looked up into his. Could any man look like that, she wondered involuntarily and yet be a killer?
“It had to be done,” he said quietly. “As I have told you, it was him or me. There was nothing else for it.”
“But – why did he want to – kill you?” Melina asked.
She saw a sudden blankness come over his face and knew that he was going to refuse to answer the question.
“You have to tell me!” she cried passionately. “Don’t you understand? I can’t go on? I can’t stay with you unless you tell me the truth. I do have to know. You have said that I helped you, saved your life, if you like. Well, don’t you owe me something? It’s only frankness and honesty I am asking for, nothing else. Just to know, just to understand what this is all about.”
He took his hand away from her chin and turned to look out over the sunlit hillside. The boy who had brought the flowers was back again beside the goats. There was no one else in sight.
It seemed utterly peaceful, quiet and serene.
“Tell me! Please tell me!” Melina begged.
“How can I be sure that I can trust you?” Bing answered. “It’s not just my secret. It would be so easy for you to walk out on me, as you were trying to do just now. There could be a word here or a word there and Heaven knows what would not be involved.”
“You can trust me,” Melina said briefly. “Perhaps I should have told you before. My father was Sir Frederick Lindsay!”
Love Is Dangerous Page 4